The Wife He Threw Away

Chapter 6

She waited until nine in the morning to call, because some habits — propriety, patience, the decades-old instinct to do things at a reasonable hour even when her chest felt like it had been hollowed out overnight — didn’t disappear just because everything else had.

The number rang twice before a familiar voice picked up, older now, roughened slightly by years she hadn’t been present for.

“Wentworth and Cole.”

“I need to speak with Mr. Wentworth,” Amelia said. “Tell him it’s Amelia Sinclair.”

There was a pause on the line — brief, but unmistakable, the kind of pause that told her exactly how long it had been since anyone had said that name in this office. “One moment, please.”

She stood at the window while she waited, looking down at the city eleven stories below, still gray with early light, the streets just beginning to fill with the first wave of people heading to jobs that mattered to no one but themselves. She wondered, distantly, what Ethan was doing right now. Whether he’d noticed she hadn’t come to bed. Whether he’d slept at all, or whether the Meridian acquisition had swallowed even the hours that belonged, technically, to grief.

“Amelia.” Harold Wentworth’s voice, when it came, was warm in a way that surprised her — not the practiced warmth of a man billing by the hour, but something that sounded almost relieved. “It’s been a long time.”

“It has.” She found she didn’t know how to begin, now that the moment had actually arrived. “I’m sorry to call so early.”

“Don’t apologize. I’ve been waiting for this call for three years.” A pause, gentler this time. “How are you, dear?”

The question undid something in her chest that she’d been holding together by sheer will since the terrace the night before. She had to look out at the gray city for a moment before she trusted her voice.

“I think I need to come in,” she said finally. “Today, if possible.”

“Of course. Whenever you’re ready.” Another pause, longer, the kind that told her he was choosing his next words carefully. “Amelia — I should tell you something, and I’d rather you hear it from me than read it in a file.”

Something in his tone made her go still. “What is it?”

“Your grandfather,” Harold said. “He’s not well.”

She didn’t remember the drive to the office. She remembered standing in the elevator of a building she hadn’t entered in years, watching the floor numbers climb, her reflection ghostly in the polished steel doors — a woman in yesterday’s clothes, hastily changed, hair still damp from a shower she’d taken on autopilot. She remembered Harold Wentworth’s office exactly as she’d left it: dark wood, leather chairs, a window that looked out over a different slice of the same indifferent skyline.

“Sit, please.” Harold gestured to the chair across from his desk, and for the first time since she’d known him — since she was a teenager, sitting in this same chair while her grandfather negotiated the terms of a trust she hadn’t yet understood the weight of — he looked uncertain how to begin.

“Tell me,” Amelia said. “All of it. Please.”

“It’s his heart.” Harold folded his hands on the desk. “He’s been managing it for two years, quietly, without making it public. Stress, primarily — though at his age, and given everything he’s carried, it was perhaps inevitable. He had a serious episode last week. He’s stable now. But his cardiologist has been candid with him about how much time he likely has left, if he continues at the pace he’s been keeping.”

Amelia felt the words land somewhere distant, like they were happening to someone else’s grandfather, someone else’s life. “Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

“Because you asked us not to contact you,” Harold said, not unkindly. “Three years ago, when you came to this office and asked us to honor your privacy completely — to let you live the life you’d chosen, without interference from the family or the company. We honored that. Your grandfather insisted we honor it, even when it cost him.”

“He could have told me himself.”

“He could have.” Harold’s expression softened. “He chose not to. He said, more than once, that he wanted you to come back on your own terms, if you ever came back at all — not because he summoned you, not because guilt or obligation pulled you in, but because you decided, for yourself, that it was time. He said anything less wouldn’t really be you coming home. It would just be you trading one set of expectations for another.”

Amelia sat with that for a long moment, the weight of it settling somewhere she didn’t have words for yet. Her grandfather — stubborn, proud, fiercely protective in his own distant way — choosing to suffer the silence rather than pull her back before she was ready.

“Can I see him?” she asked.

“He’s at Lenox Hill. Private wing.” Harold hesitated. “Amelia — may I ask what brought you in today? It’s been three years of silence, and then you call at nine in the morning asking to come in immediately. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”

She thought about how to answer that. About the gala, the stage, Vanessa’s red dress and Ethan’s certain, closing voice on the terrace. You knew what this marriage was when you signed up for it. She thought about the folder in the guest room drawer, the photograph of her grandfather young and unguarded in front of a building that had been waiting for her, patiently, for three years.

“I think,” she said slowly, “I’m ready to stop disappearing.”

Something in Harold’s face shifted — not quite a smile, but close to one, the particular satisfaction of a man who’d been waiting a long time to hear exactly those words.

“Then let’s go see your grandfather,” he said, rising from his chair. “I suspect he’s been waiting even longer than I have.”